Teddy girls in the 1950s

[Mossleybrow]

Rose Hendon remembered: "Me and my friends used to go to the Back Ace Club in the Harrow Road. They had a juke box, and we’d all meet up there for coffee. Or we’d go down the Seven Feathers Club and there’d be music and you’d do your dancing. That was where I used to go with my boyfriend Jimmy. He was one of the Teddy Boys. They were smart. And it was because of that us girls started getting that look…We started wearing turned-up drainpipe jeans. Plastic belts round them. And blouses with a wing collar. Then we added in cameo brooches, and scarf, tailored jackets with wide lapels and velvet collars, white ankle socks and flat black shoes…The thing I spent most money on was an Astrakhan coat. It was £25 . It came from Debenhams in the Harrow Road, and buying it felt just really good. I felt …glamorous." Virginia Nicholson, Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes, (2015), pp.356-357.

Dark colours are passive. We are in a passive situation. Also, agsin bright colours happen in bright times.

Those lovely colours are from 1924 which was the postwar boom. Also dark colours are colours used in winter. Brighter colours appear in summer.

But the obsession with black started way back with Chanel’s LBD. And it’s viewed as sophisticated.

In her autobiography "Promise of A Dream: Rembering the Sixties" the socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham, who was middle-class from Leeds, often mentions what she wearing. In 1960 she hang out with her friends in Leeds coffee bars, imagining they were really on the Left Bank in Paris "Bar introduced the newly fashionable brown make-up, Lindsay acquired pair of black stockings and i grew my hair, swelling with pride when shopkeepeers enquired "You an art student?'... She went to Paris for a few months and went on a date " I got dressed up in my smart beatnik outfit: high heels, black stockings, C&A tight black jumper over a dark, pleated skirt in muted greys and blues."...She went to St Hilda's college, Oxford in 1961, packing her antique washed Levis and shift dress with muddy gold and wine stripes bought in Bon Marche, her hair was now long and completely straight. A couple of yeats later she scuttled around Oxford in her "denim outfits with a short black belted shiny mac - though still in the Leeds stilettos". After college she moved to Hackney in 1964. "Working-class women of my age still sported elaborate beehive hairdos...but the teenage girls hair was now straight and they wore dark-coloured three-quarter-length leather jackets made in the local East End sweat shops." Sheila did some teaching locally : The East End girls...in their brightly coloured sling-back coats and perms, patiently set about teaching me to teach." By 1966 a friend would " survey my 'Swinging London' Chelsea clothes and call me 'the bird'." Sheila revelled in the "fast moving fashion of boutiques like Biba or Bazaar. The sharp zigzags of Op Art were being quickly superseded by the flowing lines inspired by Aubrey Beardsley and the vampish boas of the early silent movies. Young designers dived into the past like raiders searching for lost wrecks of spoil and their time-travelling motifs overlaid the early-sixties quest for an obscured bedrock of truth." By 1967 she was a hippie, but it soon palled:"..I found the hippie camp too confining...what I wanted was fluidity and being able to move between worlds. So I bought my bits of velvet and lace on the King's Road and then went off to Chelsea Girl on Dalston Lane and tried on mass-market compromises." www.versobooks.com/books/3012-promise-of-a-dream

That’s so interesting!

My friend’s mum was a Beatnik. She used to iron her hair straight and walk down the street in bare feet. Apparently her grandma was horrified.

I’ve noticed recently (well for the last few years) tops being tucked in and a bigger emphasis on a female shape. Line the waist has returned.

This may be interesting in the future as so many women are losing jobs/doing childcare. And lo, the waist has reappeared as women are being forced out of work. Interesting co-incidence..🤔

Model training school in 1955

Model school in 1964

Oh wow.

My mother in law (as she tells us not more than about twice a week) was a model in London in about 1956. I need to show her this!

"The biggest equaliser is jeans. The more freedom women achieved ( since the 50’s) the more men and women wore jeans"

Reminded me straight away of Umberto Eco's theory that jeans trouble the testicles and according to him, inhibit thought (essay called 'Lumbar Thought'.) Maybe they give some freedom, take some away, depending on your undercarriage!

Jeans in the 70’s probably troubled the testicles greatly!

How different models looked then..

His mind definitely looks to be wandering...

People think of the fifties as a sea of full skirts and net petticoats, all frills and bows, but it was the first decade when women really embraced trousers, and pictures of my mother in the fifties show her in beautiful mannish trousers tapering to the ankle, fitted blouses, and neat little sweaters, often hand made, with loafer type shoes. The full skirts were there in her Summer dresses and for dances.

Blimey Bowie’s jeans !

That's his Jean Genie!

Yeah, the Capri pant was introduced in the 50’s. And women wore jeans.

Trousers were called slacks then😁

Loving this thread !

Weren't the Teddy boys a hugely racist gang that went about pulverising black immigrants abd their children in the 1950s and 1960s?

Wouldn't be copying THAT look....